'So that when I stretch'd out my hand.....'

 It was on this day in 1768 that Laurence Sterne died, at the age of fifty-four, less than three weeks after the publication of his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. What happened after his death is a strange saga of interment, 'resurrection', reinterment, disinterment and eventual burial of at least part of the remains in their rightful grave. I've written about it before here – and there's a fine account of Sterne's long duel with death in the excellent Public Domain Review: here's the link – 

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne/?fbclid=IwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNEfq_ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns

Sterne's creative life closed more elegantly, with the gloriously inconclusive ending of A Sentimental Journey,  at once deathly and bawdy. Yorick, Sterne's alter ego, has been obliged to share a bedchamber with an attractive young Piedmontese lady, who has an equally attractive maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety (rather in the manner of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night), Yorick, restless and unable to sleep, exclaims 'O my God!'...

'– You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME